As you may know, I began digging into Xamarin at the end of last year. It showed a lot of promise as a great way to create cross-platform iOS and Android apps leveraging the existing Visual Studio and C# skills that so many developers have.

When I first started working with it, I did have some initial concerns as I talked about in these 2 blog posts.

I’m often asked by students from my Android courses as to how I’m able to use Lambda expressions like the following in my Android programs.

The short answer is: I’m not able to use them. 🙂 What I typed was the following.

The Lambda expressions appear in the editor due to a feature of Android Studio called “Code Folding”.

Android Studio does this sort’a thing in a number of scenarios. You can tell the Lambda expression is a result of code-folding by the highlight that appears over the folded portion of code.

You can also easily identify that the Lambda expression is a result of code folding because the editor will display a plus-sign to the left of the statement. You can view the full, original statement by clicking on the plus sign.

Lamba expression substitution is controlled by the following value in the Android Studio Settings dialog.

As this is my first post of 2014, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone … Happy New Year!!